Tag Archives: tech

China Daily. There was a time when the newsweeklies set the agenda for the nation’s conversation – when Time and Newsweek would digest the events of the week and US readers would wait by their mailboxes to see what was on the covers.

Those days have passed, and come the end of the year, the print edition of Newsweek will pass, too. Cause of death: The march of time.

“The tempo of the news and the Web have completely overtaken the news magazines,” said Stephen G. Smith, editor of the Washington Examiner and the holder of an unprecedented newsweekly triple crown – nation editor at Time, editor of US News and World Report, and executive editor of Newsweek from 1986 to 1991.

Where once readers were content to sit back and wait for tempered accounts of domestic and foreign events, they now can find much of what they need almost instantaneously on their smartphones and tablet computers. Where once advertisers had limited places to spend their dollars to reach national audiences, they now have seemingly unlimited alternatives.

So on Thursday, when Newsweek’s current owners announced they intended to halt print publication and expand the magazine’s Web presence, there was little surprise. But there was a good deal of nostalgia for what Smith called “the shared conversation that the nation used to have”, when the networks, the newsweeklies and a few national newspapers reigned.

FT.com. Yahoo has decided to pull the plug on its portal service in South Korea in December after years of struggling to compete in one of the world’s most wired markets.

“Yahoo has faced several challenges in the past couple of years and decided to pull out of the [Korean] business to put more resources on global business and become more powerful and successful,” the internet service provider said on Friday.

Yahoo is a marginal player in South Korea’s internet search sector, having only 2-3 per cent market share.

MarketWatch.With geeks and their lifestyles emerging as the new totems of coolness, marketers from a wide swath of companies are jumping on the trend for marketing opportunities, and there is perhaps no better target audience than the attendees at New York Comic Con.

The people drawn to New York Comic Con because of their fascination for Avengers, Spider-Man characters, and countless other creations “are people who are setting trends,” said Dan Buckley, president and publisher of print, digital and TV at Marvel, in an interview. “They are the early adopters of technology. These are the people who start things and make them hot.”

Getting the attention of trendsetters is crucial for these companies particularly in today’s digital world, where a tweet or a Facebook post can generate broad levels of interest. Companies are seeking to build loyalty with consumers who have myriad choices and have changed the way they purchase and spend their leisure time with smartphones and other mobile devices, analysts said.

A sleepy Dutch community was still recovering on Saturday from the aftermath of a sweet sixteen party whose invitation, for no clear reason, went viral, spawning a YouTube video, drawing impromptu partygoers by the thousands as well as riot police, and causing the young celebrant and her family to flee town.

Fires were set, a car was burned, shops were vandalized, six people were hurt and some 34 arrested, according to the BBC and the Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation.

“She posted the invitation on Facebook and sent it to friends, who then sent it to other friends and soon it spread like wildfire across the Internet,” a spokeswoman for the Groningen police, Melanie Zwama, told Agence France Presse, according to the BBC.

Haren, a town of 19,000 about 110 miles northeast of Amsterdam, had been girding for trouble all week after the youngster’s Facebook party invitation, which had not been set to be private, ended up going out to a reported 30,000 people. Popular deejays endorsed the event, a Twitter account was born, and T-shirts were printed, sold and sported by some who descended on the town. NYT

Centuries-old theological disputes have broken out in cyberspace as religions aim to influence the future presentation of faith on the Internet.

The forum for the rivalry is not the pulpit or church bulletin, but the website of ICANN, the corporation that oversees the Internet address system and now wants to expand it beyond the usual .com, .org or .net domains.

When ICANN began accepting applications for new names early this year, bids came for extensions such as .catholic, .islam and .bible. Not far behind were critics who challenged many applicants’ right to monopolize those and other religious terms.

“I respectfully ask you not to award .bible to a bunch of hardcore Bible-thumpers,” wrote one critic of an application by the American Bible Society to manage that extension.

Questioning a Turkish IT company’s bid for the .islam domain, Fahd Batayneh of Jordan’s National Information Technology Centre asked how it could ensure no pornographers or Muslim extremists would use names with this ending?

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is accepting comments on these and other applications for another month and will then evaluate the bids for new extensions, known as top level domains (TLDs).

First results are due next summer. A group awarded a TLD can manage that domain exclusively, renting out addresses that use its extension and rejecting bids it considers unsuitable. Via Stuff NZ

$1 billion judgment levied against Samsung for infringing on Apple’s patents reportedly has the South Korea company reeling. While Samsung executives weren’t optimistic about an overwhelming victory in a Silicon Valley courtroom last week, the one-sided decision loss apparently caught them by surprise.

Since a jury in a San Jose, Calif., courtroom on Friday decided overwhelmingly in favor of Apple’s patent claims against Samsung, the Korea electronics giant has focused on the verdict’s effect on the smartphone market. The company called the awarding of $1.05 billion in damages to Apple “a loss for the American consumer” and promised that “this is not the final word in this case.”

When you think about which country is the world’s biggest source of Internet attacks, the usual suspects first come to mind.

The United States, perhaps, because it has the most individual IP addresses and such free-flowing Web traffic. China is always a candidate, since it has so many users and has often been accused of being behind attacks. Russia is another traditional source of attacks.